Pope Francis warned against allowing the rebirth of "pernicious" anti-Semitic attitudes that fueled the Holocaust during a visit to Lithuania that commemorated the country's Jewish community -- a group that was almost obliterated during World War II.

Francis began his second day in the Baltics in Lithuania's second city, Kaunas, where an estimated 3,000 Jews survived out of a community of 37,000 during the 1941-1944 Nazi occupation.

The Baltic countries declared their independence in 1918 but were annexed into the Soviet Union in 1940 in a secret agreement with Nazi Germany.

Except for the 1941-1944 Nazi occupation, the Baltic countries remained part of the Soviet Union until its collapse in the early 1990s.

The issue of Lithuanian complicity in Nazi war crimes is sensitive here.